American Families

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parents' divorce or never having been married, every other American child spends part of his or her childhood in a single-parent family. The increase in the proportion of children living with just one parent has strongly affected large number of children. By the time they reach age sixteen, close to half the children of married parents will have seen their parents divorce. For nearly half of these, it will be five years more before their mothers remarry. Close to half of all white children whose parents remarry will see the second marriage dissolve during their adolescence. (Hamburg, 1996) With all of this, family matters get complicated very fast. Let's take the instance of Paul, a high-school student. Paul's parents, Mary and John get a divorce. John moves in with Sally who already has two boys. Mary meets Jack, who is divorced and has three girls. When Mary and Jack get married, Paul has a mother, a father, a stepmother, a stepfather, five stepbrothers and stepsisters, and four ...

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extent of worry in the child. (Brokaw,1998) Also just seeing the distress of friends whose parents are splitting apart makes the child scared of the humiliating situation. "The complexity of families has reached astounding proportions," says Frank Furstenberg, University of Pennsylvania sociologist. A child who lives in such circumstances finds it very difficult to reckon who are his "kin-folk" and whether or not the people that he or she counts as kin can be counted upon in times of need. (Kantrowitz, 1992) An example of this can be presented by looking at Julie, another adolescent in her late teens. Julie lives with her grandmother because she was abused by her mother. There is ...

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